What time of day do you get the most out of Twitter? HubSpot reveals all.

One of those golden questions that we’d all like to know the answer to. Especially as journalists. If we’re asking for some information in the form of a question we want to ask it at the time that will brings back the most responses, right?

Similarly if we’re tweeting out news articles, videos, audio interviews etc we want to post them and shout about them when the optimum number of eyes will see our work, of course.

I’ve been looking around for stats on this for a while and came across HubSpot – a fab site dedicated to social media marketing mostly aimed at businesses and advertisers. Lots may think that as journalists marketing isn’t really our thing – it’s the dark side, but when it comes to online journalism and the effective use of social media within our work – it most definitely is.

HubSpot have data on all sorts of things on all the big social media platforms. You can find out what the most retweeted words are, what kind of thing gets the most ‘likes’ on Facebook and what things make users click through links you post in updates.

We all use social media, but lots of us don’t know how to use it properly. Whether you’re contributing to a blog, updating items online as part of a larger news organisation or finding guests for programmes, optimising your social media usage can make a big impact on your journalism.

After scraping data on the best time of day to send tweets, I put together this visualization using ManyEyes:

From the data above we can see that the best times to tweet is:

9-10am in the morning

12-1pm over lunch

4-5pm in the evening

These times correspond directly to an average working day. People arriving at work in the morning switch on their computer and check Twitter, this happens again over lunch breaks and again at the end of the day when employees are anticipating home-time and may be hurrying time along by checking their social networks/tweeting out work they’ve completed during the day.

So keep these times in mind when sharing content with your digital networks – the more eyes the better right?